LibGuides: English Literature: Digitized Archives & Primary Sources

What is a Primary Source?

Primary sources are produced by participants or direct observers of an issue, event or time period. These sources may be recorded during the event or later on by a participant reflecting upon the event. In some cases, it will be difficult to obtain the original source, so you may have to rely on copies (photocopies, microfilm, digital copies).

Some examples of primary sources include:

Newspapers
Speeches
Government Documents
Legal Documents
Public Opinion Polls
Personal Materials: letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs, autobiographies, and oral histories
Images

Online Historical & Primary Sources

Gale Primary Sources This link opens in a new window
Artemis Primary Sources is an integrated research environment that allows users to search across Gale primary source collections. Artemis Primary Sources takes users beyond a simple search and retrieve workflow, allowing them to analyze content using frequency and term-relationship tools. Currently, Artemis Primary Sources includes Eighteenth Century Collections Online and Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Other resources are being added.
Caribbean Literature This link opens in a new window
Updated biweekly. A searchable collection of poetry and fiction from every Caribbean country produced during the 19th and 20th centuries. Titles include numerous rare and hard-to-find works written in English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and various Creole languages. The database currently has over 10,000 pages.
Early American Imprints This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Contains the full text of all known existing books, pamphlets, and broadsides printed in the United States (or British American colonies prior to Independence) from 1639 through 1800. Based on the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans, every nonserial item listed in Evans is reproduced and an additional 1100 titles from Bristol's supplement to Evans is also included.
Early English Books Online This link opens in a new window
Access to EEBO's Text Creation Partnership is now available.

Aims to provide the total surviving print record of the English speaking world for 227 years (1473-1700). It is the digital version of the popular Early English Books I, Early English Books II, Thomason Tracts, and Early English Books Tract Supplements microfilm collections. The project aims to reproduce all items produced by a printing press (such as books, pamphlets, broadsides) in England and its colonies and any item that was printed anywhere in the world in English between 1473 and 1700.

In order to view the PDF documents, you will need the Acrobat Reader plugin from Adobe.
ECCO: Eighteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
Users may need to refresh cache and cookies or use a private browsing window for this resource. Updated regularly. An online collection of English and foreign language books, pamphlets, broadsides and other ephemera published in the U.K. and the Americas between 1701 and 1800. Content is presented as full text page images which can be viewed online or downloaded as PDF documents. When complete, more than 33 million pages of material will support full text searching. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Eighteenth Connect

Electronic Enlightenment This link opens in a new window
Updated twice annually. Provides the most wide-ranging online collection of edited correspondence of the early modern period, linking people across Europe, the Americas and Asia from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. Includes letters in English, French, German and Italian from families and friends, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers, etc. Also includes primary source letters from more than 6,000 writers and numerous presses, as well as document sources such as manuscripts and early printed editions, scholarly annotations, and links to biographies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, newspapers, and other online resources. Explore the writer's views on history, literature, language, arts, philosophy, science, medicine, and personal, social and political relations.
An ongoing scholarly research project of the University of Oxford and other universities and organizations.
English Poetry This link opens in a new window
Redefines the English poetic canon for the 21st century, building on the achievement of the original English Poetry collection (which contained the complete English poetic canon from the 8th century to the early 20th with over 160,000 poems by more than 1,250 poets drawn from nearly 4,500 printed sources) with enhanced functionality and the addition of more than 20,000 poems. A comprehensive archive of English verse, the database offers both the literary heritages of former colonial countries and of the poetic legacies of English writers.
Latin American Women Writers This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. An extensive searchable collection of prose, poetry, and drama by women writers from Mexico, Central, and South America. Also included are essays by Latin American feminists and revolutionaries, who address both the universal concerns of women in every age and the distinctive issues of their struggles in the region.
Currently contains 14,300 pages of prose and poetry and 13 plays; will contain approximately 100,000 pages of prose, poetry, and essays and 300 plays when complete.
Latino Literature This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Brings together more than 100,000 pages of poetry, fiction, and drama written in English and Spanish by hundreds of Chicano, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Latin authors working in the United States. Includes nearly 800 items (poems, novels, and plays) that have never been published before. Users will also find numerous Chicano folk tales and audio files of selected poems and plays. Currently has over 106,000 pages of poetry, fiction, and drama.
Modernist Journals Project This link opens in a new window
The Modernist Journals Project is a multi-faceted project that aims to be a major resource for the study of modernism and its rise in the English-speaking world, with periodical literature as its central concern. The historical scope of the project has a chronological range of 1890 to 1922, and a geographical range that extends to wherever English language periodicals were published. With magazines at its core, the MJP also offers a range of genres that extends to the digital publication of books directly connected to modernist periodicals and other supporting materials for periodical study.

NINES: Nineteenth Century Scholarship Online

Nineteenth (19th) Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century. The content is sourced from the world's preeminent libraries and archives. It consists of monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, photographs, statistics, and other kinds of documents in both Western and non-Western languages.
Access to this resource is partially funded by the Emily Knauss Library Endowment for the Liberal Arts.

Poetess Archive (1750-1900)

Twentieth Century American Poetry This link opens in a new window
Updated periodically. Includes more than 52,000 poems drawn from 750 volumes of poetry by over 300 American poets.
Twentieth Century English Poetry This link opens in a new window
Updated periodically. Includes more than 20,000 poems drawn from 594 volumes of poetry by over 282 English poets.

Victorian Women's Writer Project

Asian American Drama This link opens in a new window
Documents the Asian American experience as dramatized in works by writers from the 18th century to the present. Brings together biographies, a performance database, production details, and associated visual resources, including photos, playbills, and manuscript images. Brings together more than 250 plays, beginning with the works of Sadakichi Hartmann in the late nineteenth century and progresses to the writings of contemporary playwrights, such as Philip Kan Gotanda, Elizabeth Wong, and Jeannie Barroga. Along with many works by writers of Japanese, Filipino, Vietnamese, and Chinese descent, includes plays by writers of Hawaiian, Indian, Thai, Korean, Persian, and Malaysian ancestry.
Black Drama This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Contains approximately 1200 plays written from the mid-1800s to the present, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies, and more. Also includes selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays. The content represents North America, English-speaking Africa, the Caribbean, and other African diaspora countries. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print.
The database covers key writings of the Harlem Renaissance, works performed for the Federal Theatre Project, and plays by critically acclaimed dramatists of the 1940s. The collection includes musical comedies, domestic dramas, folk dramas, history plays, anti-slavery plays, one-act plays, and other works. Many were published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, others have never before been published or performed.
Classic Mexican Cinema This link opens in a new window
The Golden Age of Mexican Cinema is illuminated in this collection of popular movie periodicals. Not only does it include chief magazines such as Cinema Reporter (1943-1965) and Cine Mundial (1954-1955), it also features extremely rare copies of El Cine Gráfico from 1935 and of the weekly El Mundo Ilustrado (1902-1910). The true extent of the popularity of Mexican film is illustrated by Cinelandia (1931-1947), which was published in Hollywood both in Spanish and in English. This collection also includes dozens of film flyers as well as the personal scrap books of Fernando de Fuentes (1894-1958), one of the leading Latin-American filmmakers to this day. These volumes contain reviews, movie stills, programs, and advertisements.

Note: Not compatible with all web browsers. For best results use Chrome, Edge, or Firefox.
Shakespeare in Performance This link opens in a new window
Shakespeare in Performance showcases over 1,000 rare and unique prompt books of 34 of Shakespeare’s plays from the world-famous Folger Shakespeare Library. These prompt books tell the story of Shakespeare’s plays as they were performed in theatres throughout Great Britain, the United States and internationally, between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.
Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer
Twentieth Century North American Drama This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Provides the full text of 2,000 plays written from the late 1800's to the present by more than 200 playwrights from North America. Many of the works are rare, hard-to-find, or out of print. Nearly a quarter of the collection consists of previously unpublished plays.
Each play is extensively and deeply indexed, allowing both keyword and multi-fielded searching. The plays are accompanied by reference materials, significant ancillary information, a rich performance database, and images.
Includes a focus on gay and lesbian theatre, along with plays drawn from the Jewish theatre, American Indian theatre, and other groups. Also provides selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.

17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers This link opens in a new window
The newspapers and pamphlets gathered by the Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) represent the largest single collection of 17th and 18th century English news media available anywhere. The 1,270-title collection includes a wide range of pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period, covering more than 200 years of accounts from newspapers from England, Ireland, Scotland and a handful of papers from British colonies in the Americas and Asia.
African American Newspapers, Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly (until completed). When completed, will provide online access to approximately 270 African American U.S. newspapers. Features papers from more than 35 states. The newspapers were scanned from the collections of the Wisconsin Historical Society, Kansas State Historical Society and the Library of Congress.
Alt-Press Watch This link opens in a new window
Updated monthly. Provides full-text coverage of newspapers, magazines and journals of the alternative and independent press in America. Includes a broad range of critical issues confronting contemporary society, such as ecology and the environment, grassroots organizing, labor, indigenous peoples, and public policy.
America's Historical Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. Includes more than 1,000 U.S. historical newspapers published between 1690 and the 1990s, including titles from all 50 states. Search by dates/eras, article types (news & opinion, election returns, letters, poetry/songs, legislative, prices, advertisements, matrimony & death notices), region/state, and newspaper name.
British Periodicals Collection This link opens in a new window
Provides access to the searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late seventeenth century to the early twentieth, comprising millions of high-resolution facsimile page images.
Ethnic NewsWatch This link opens in a new window
Updated monthly. Provides full-text coverage of newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press in America (some international coverage). Includes more than 400,000 full-text articles from 200 publications.
Hispanic American Newspapers This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a large compilation of Spanish-language newspapers printed in the U.S. during the 19th and 20th centuries. Includes many newspapers published bilingually in Spanish and English. Features hundreds of Hispanic American newspapers, including many long scattered and forgotten titles published in the 19th century.
Based on the “Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project", a national research effort directed by Professor Nicolás Kanellos.
Independent Voices This link opens in a new window
Independent Voices is an open access digital collection of alternative press newspapers, magazines and journals, drawn from the special collections of participating libraries. These periodicals were produced by feminists, dissident GIs, campus radicals, Native Americans, anti-war activists, Black Power advocates, Hispanics, LGBT activists, the extreme right-wing press and alternative literary magazines during the latter half of the 20th century.
Nexis Uni This link opens in a new window
Updated continually. Nexis Uni™ features more than 15,000 news, business and legal sources from LexisNexis®—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790—with an interface that offers discovery across all content types, personalization features such as Alerts and saved searches and a collaborative workspace with shared folders and annotated documents.
Los Angeles Times (Historical) This link opens in a new window
Updated annually. Provides comprehensive coverage for Southern California's largest daily newspaper. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1881. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
New York Times (Historical) This link opens in a new window
Updated annually. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1851. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.
Dallas Morning News (Historical) This link opens in a new window
Provides comprehensive coverage for one of the largest daily newspapers in Texas. Accessible by keyword and date searching. Documents major events in Texas, the United States, and the world, providing valuable primary source information. Includes classified and display advertising, photos and graphics.
Washington Post (Historical) This link opens in a new window
Updated annually. Includes all the articles published since the first issue of the paper in 1877. Provides full text and full image articles with digital reproductions of every page, every article and every issue in PDF format. In addition to news stories, includes editorials, letters to the editor, obituaries, birth and marriage announcements, photos, and advertisements.
More recent years are also available in other full text resources.

African American Studies Center This link opens in a new window
Updated regularly. A comprehensive collection of scholarship focused on the lives and events which have shaped African American and African history and culture, coupled with sophisticated technology permitting precise search and browse capabilities. Features over 7,500 articles from Oxford's authoritative reference works, approximately 100 primary sources with specially written commentaries, over 1,000 images, over 100 maps, over 200 charts and tables, timelines to guide researchers through the history of African Americans and over 6,000 biographies.
Some of the titles included in this access are:
- African American Artists before the Twentieth Century
- African American National Biography
- Africana
- Black Women in America, Second Edition
- Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
- Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895
- Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present
American History Collection This link opens in a new window
A gateway into one of the great conversations in history. These newly prepared digital editions of the papers of many of the major figures of the early republic are presented in a fully searchable and interoperable online environment.
Collections include:
- The Adams Papers
- The Papers of Alexander Hamilton
- The Papers of Andrew Jackson
- The Selected Papers of John Jay
- The Papers of Thomas Jefferson
- The Dolley Madison Digital Edition
- The Papers of James Madison
- The Papers of John Marshall
- The Papers of George Washington
- The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution
- Founders Early Access
Arte Público Hispanic Historical Collection: Series 1 This link opens in a new window
Provides access to a digital collection of historical content pertaining to U.S. Hispanic history, literature and culture. Includes historical articles, newspapers, religious pamphlets, broadsides, historical books, letters, short stories, poems, advertisements, and more. The content is in Spanish (80%) and English (20%), and is searchable in both languages. Materials are drawn from the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project.
Clotel, or The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States This link opens in a new window
The first African American novel, Clotel was published in 1853 in London. William Wells Brown, the author, was still legally a slave in the United States. The work's stature derives borh from its remarkable origin and its explosive content, which is freely based on the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
Brown went on to publish three additional, and very different, versions of the novel. This digital edition of Clotel presents, for the first time together, the full extant texts of the four versions. These texts, with 618 pages in all, are fully imaged and coded and may be read individually or in parallel, allowing the user to explore the relationships among the various versions. Further functionality allows the reader to access complex historical collation. In addition to illuminating introductory essays, the editor has provided biographical, critical, and historical commentary as well as line-by-line annotations to all four texts.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) This link opens in a new window
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) contains metadata records —information describing an item —for millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the content provider’s website. The DPLA brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. It strives to contain the full breadth of human expression, from the written word, to works of art and culture, to records of America’s heritage, to the efforts and data of science. The DPLA aims to expand this crucial realm of openly available materials, and make those riches more easily discovered and more widely usable and used.

Documenting the American South

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories
Updated quarterly (until completed). Provides a view of what it meant to immigrate to America and Canada between 1800 and 1950. When completed, will include more than 100,000 pages of personal narratives including letters, diaries, pamphlets, autobiographies, and oral histories. Currently contains 342 authors and approximately 37,500 pages of information.
North American Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Updated quarterly (until completed). Includes diaries, journals, and letters written by women visiting or living in North America between the years 1700 and 1950. When complete, the database will be the largest collection of women's diaries and correspondence ever assembled and include the personal experiences of 1,500 women from all classes and walks of life.
Victorian Popular Culture This link opens in a new window
Describes popular entertainment in America, Britain and Europe during the years 1779 to 1930. Concerned primarily with texts published during the "long" nineteenth century, from the beginnings of Mesmerism in 1779 through to the 1930s. Covers English, History, Drama and Cultural Studies with a wealth of visual resources. Arranged in three subject sections:
- Popular Enchantments: Magicians, Conjurors and Illusionists
- Spiritualism: Mediums, Psychics and Spirits
- From Mesmer’s ‘New Science’ to Animal Magnetism, Hypnotism and Psychical Research
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin contributed material to this project.

Search across Adam Matthew primary source databases using AM Explorer
Women and Social Movements (U.S.) This link opens in a new window
Updated quarterly. Organized around the history of women in social movements in the U.S. between 1600 and 2000. A resource for the teaching the history of women in the United States. Consists of 74 editorial projects with more than 2200 primary documents intended for use in high school and college history classrooms. Also includes a major collection of links to related websites and a search engine that permits users to do full text searching of all the primary documents mounted on the site.

Humanities Librarian

Gina Bastone

she/they

Contact:

g.bastone@austin.utexas.edu

Subjects: Comparative Literature, Creative Writing, Disability Studies, English Literature, LGBTQ Studies, Rhetoric, Women's and Gender Studies

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